


Merciful Monster

by AVegetarianCannibal



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Bottom Hannibal Lecter, Captivity, M/M, Murder Husbands, bottom hannibal day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-10
Updated: 2020-08-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:08:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25816300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AVegetarianCannibal/pseuds/AVegetarianCannibal
Summary: Alana Bloom finally has Hannibal Lecter in her custody, far from any legal jurisdiction.But a monster is on his way, and he’s not going to stop until he’s found what he wants.
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 26
Kudos: 243
Collections: Bottom Hannibal Day





	Merciful Monster

**Author's Note:**

> For 2020 Bottom Hannibal Day

After two years, Hannibal Lecter is finally in her custody. 

He’s not struggling. He’s not trying to escape. He sits at the table in the middle of her interrogation room, wrists and ankles cuffed and chained into the concrete floor. He is nude except for the black canvas bag covering his head. There’s nowhere to hide anything—and her guards have checked every nook and cranny of his body.

Alana nods to one of two guards standing at their post on either side of him, and he plucks the bag off Hannibal’s head.

He blinks at the sudden exposure to light, even as dim as it is, and has a look around the room. His expression is pleasant. His face is tanned and his hair is long, but not unkempt. He’s gained ten or fifteen pounds since she last saw him, and it looks to be all muscle. He looks stupidly, incongruously happy.

He smiles at one guard, then the other, taking in their all-black unmarked uniforms and multiple weapons hanging from their waist packs.

“I’m sure you thought this was a good career move,” Hannibal says. “We won’t hold it against you when the time comes. Probably.”

Alana, watching this from behind the observation window, leans towards the mic and presses a button. “You can leave,” she tells the guards.

Hannibal’s smile brightens. He lifts his head to look at her through the window, even though he can’t see her through the mirror coating. “Hello again, Alana. I was fairly certain it was you, as nobody else has the money for this kind of lavish private expenditure. I hope you’re well.”

The door behind her opens and Jack Crawford walks in with an expression of steely hatred. His dour mood doesn’t match the pastel linen suit or bright little hibiscus flower pinned to his lapel. Until now, being on the island has seemed to ease his mind.

“Where are the guards?”

“I sent them away.”

“You don’t want witnesses? I thought you paid them enough to keep their traps shut.”

“They’re nearby if we need them,” she says.

Crawford snorts. “Trust me. We’ll need them—and I hope they really _are_ the best.”

“Stay here,” she tells him before going into the room.

“Might I have a glass of water?” Hannibal asks. “I imagine you want me to do a lot of talking. Not for any judiciary reasons—and congratulations on erecting such a solid facility, by the way—but for your own troublesome curiosity.”

“Hello, Dr. Lecter,” she says. “Bring in a pitcher and cups—and paper straws.”

A minute later, one of the guards enters with the items she’s requested. She pours one cupful and drops a straw in. She moves the cup just close enough to Hannibal that he can reach the straw with his lips if he strains against his bonds.

“I’m not going to bite you,” he says, and casually takes a sip. “I can’t promise you that Will won’t.”

He rolls his shoulders in such a way that the overhead lighting catches the faint, gleaming edges of the bite scars just above his right collar bone.

“He did that to you?” she asks.

“I begged him to,” Hannibal says, “the first time he took me from behind.”

Alana schools her expression. There’s probably some faint change in her breathing or her heart rate that he can pick up on, though, because he smiles like he’s just landed a hit.

“He owed me a few scars,” Hannibal says. “I wanted to be marked as his.”

She swallows a little more deeply than she should. Even now, it’s hard to picture the Will Graham she knows like… like _that_. She should’ve tried harder to catch Hannibal earlier, but putting everything together took time.

“You should accept that you never actually knew Will,” Hannibal says, as if she’d voiced her thoughts out loud. “It would do you good.”

She ignores him. “You claim that you were intimate with Will.”

His expression is almost shockingly soft. “I was nearly as surprised as you are now, even knowing Will as I do. I told him once that he was beyond my ability to predict and it’s still true—although every day since then has been an exercise in learning for me. There are things I know to be irrevocably true about him.”

“That he’s in love with you?” She adds a snort of derision.

Hannibal smiles. “As far as that can describe the depth of what he and I share—yes. We were intimate. The morning I begged for his bite, he pushed me face-down onto my bed and rammed into me as if he were dying of thirst and he could find an oasis inside me. I labored to admit him.”

She raises an eyebrow. “He forced you?”

The smile disappears from Hannibal’s face. “Nothing Will has ever done to me—or with me—has ever come without my worshipful gratitude.”

She bows her head ever so slightly. “My apologies.”

He inclines his head in acceptance. “I bled. From my shoulder… my mouth where he kissed me too hard… from my rectum. He bathed me afterwards, and I thanked him for both the immense pleasure and the sublime pain he’d given me.”

She’s not sure she believes him, but there’s always a reason for everything Hannibal Lecter says. “Was that the only time?”

Hannibal laughs, and it startles her how genuine it sounds. His eyes glimmer with mirth. “That would make it easier for you to believe, wouldn’t it? But no. A few days later, when I had healed, he laid me out on my bed—on my back this time—and made love to me so deeply, so slowly… that I thought and truly felt we were going to grow into one flesh. I’m man enough to admit tears came to my eyes more than once.”

He leans forward and takes another sip of water. He makes a pleased sound, as if he’s just tasted a fine wine. “This is very fresh. Do you have it flown in or do you desalinate the sea water here? I felt on the journey here that this is a small island.”

She ignores his attempts at ferreting out the location. “You never struck me as someone who’d take that position in bed.”

“As we’ve established, you didn’t really know me,” Hannibal says. “If you’re assuming that I would regard it as a position of weakness, do you also assume that it’s weak to kneel in church?”

She frowns. “That has something to do with it?”

He flicks his finger because he can’t move his own hand. “Just illustratively. Vulnerability isn’t always weakness, Doctor. Opening oneself to awe… to magnificence… is quite empowering in itself. He poured his longing and lust and love into me, again and again, by the riverful, and to be that vessel was an inspiration. Do you know what it’s like to know you’re the only one who can contain that? To hold the unholdable.”

Jack barges into the room, followed quickly by the two guards who grab his shoulders before he can throw himself across the table. “Assholes, back off of me!”

“Let him go,” Alana says. “Leave the room.”

The guards exchange looks, but obey her.

Jack straightens up the jacket of his suit, shrugging off the wrinkles in the shoulders. He sneers at Hannibal. “You’re comparing Will Graham to God? What do monsters know of God?”

Hannibal blinks up at him, the picture of innocence. “God _is_ a monster,” he says. He shrugs in a way that suggests he would spread his hands if he could. “Monsters of a certain magnitude are not inherently ugly. They are forces to be reckoned with, or to be taken in with awe. Hello, by the way, Agent Crawford. You seem quite healthy! Widowerhood looks surprisingly good on you. I’m glad now that I didn’t send you on to the Pearly Gates before Bella was there to meet you.”

Jack is on him in a flash, hands around Hannibal’s throat. The force of the impact would’ve knocked Hannibal out of his seat if he hadn’t been bound so tightly. Hannibal’s hands come up, scrabbling to pry Jack’s hands away, but he can’t quite reach. He just has to sit there and take it, and Alana doesn’t mind seeing the veins bulge on his brow for a little longer than is strictly necessary.

“Jack,” she finally sighs. She touches his arm and he all but throws himself back from Hannibal. “We need him alive for now.”

Hannibal, still red in the face but regaining his composure quickly, glances down at the floor, where the pitcher and cups lay spilled on the floor. Jack’s hibiscus is a crushed mess beside them.

“Might I have another cup of water?” Hannibal asks.

“Later!” she snaps. “I want to know what to expect of Will.”

“You clearly expect him to come looking for me,” Hannibal says. “Do you think you can salvage him from whatever wreckage I made of him? For your own redemption.” He looks at Jack. “If it helps at all, coming from me, you didn’t ruin him. You handed him to me, my old friend, and it saved us both.”

Jack takes a step towards the table again, but Alana stops him. “He’s still in there somewhere,” she says. “I don’t care if we have to lock him away in this place for a year with intensive therapy day and night—I’ll make him forget you.”

“A wife and child of three years couldn’t make him forget me,” Hannibal says. He gives her an infuriatingly pitying smile that makes her stomach curdle. “Dear Dr. Bloom, what chance do you have?”

Jack pushes his way around her to loom over Hannibal. “I’ll lobotomize him myself,” he spits.

“He’d kill you with your own tools,” Hannibal says. His tone is as cool as Alana has ever heard. “Before you got anywhere near him—and Will doesn’t care about the meat as I do. He’s very messy.”

Alana grabs Jack by the hand and halfway drags him back into the observation room. She seals the door and makes sure the mic to the speakers isn’t on.

“This isn’t going the way I expected,” she sighs. “Or maybe it is and what I expected should’ve been something else.”

“You sure you’ve got enough security around here?” Jack asks.

“Will Graham is brilliant,” Alana says. “But he’s only one man and he’s not really a trained fighter. I’ve got eight very well-paid ex-military around the perimeter, armed to the teeth with every nonlethal weapon there is.”

“Maybe you should’ve given them one or two lethal weapons,” Jack says.

“I want him alive,” Alana says. Jack glances away, but she waits until he looks at her again. “Alive. I’m in charge here, Jack. I don’t care what happens to Hannibal once we’ve got Will back.”

“I’m killing him myself,” he promises. 

She shrugs. “I’ll throw you a party and help you bury the body myself.”

“Still waiting for that water,” Hannibal calls out from the interrogation room. “If it wouldn’t be too much trouble.”

Alana presses the comms button. “Get Dr. Lecter another cup and long straw, would you?”

Jack stares consideringly at the window and back at Alana again. “Your guys leave any clues for Will Graham to find this place? He’ll know it’s a trap.”

“If he thinks he loves Hannibal like Hannibal says he does, he won’t have a choice.” She sighs and rubs her temples. Two years in the making and this one, single day of her plan feels more exhausting than all the other days combined. “Will Graham is like a moth battering itself against the light over the door. He’s got no choice until that light is snuffed out.”

“Thank you for the water,” Hannibal says to the guard who’s just leaving the interrogation room. He takes a sip from his new cup. “Dr. Bloom, would you like to hear about the other times I gleefully offered myself to be taken by Will Graham?”

“I don’t know if I can take this,” Jack grumbles. “I’ll be in the hall. Call me if you need anything.”

The door shuts behind him, sealing Alana in the tomblike darkness of the observation room alone. 

“I climbed into his lap one morning while he was reading the paper,” Hannibal says. “He was keeping an eye out for any mentions of us. _Please_ , I said to him. _Please_. I need you. I kissed his beautiful, scarred face, and offered him my throat if he wished to bite it, but he didn’t. I made him hard with my hands and begged him to take me. He stretched me open right there in his lap and speared me with his perfect cock. The feeling of it stretching me was like a burst of sunlight… blinding me to anything else. I was wanton with need as I rode him, unable to stop myself even after he’d filled me. He had to carry me to my bed, still inside me, and had me again while I lay limply against the sheets. When he couldn’t get hard again, he used his fingers on me, and then he sucked me for the first time. I think it may have been the first time he ever fellated a man, do you know? But ah, that pure imagination he has. He’s as clever with his mouth as he is with his hands, as he is with killing.”

Alana shudders at the last of it. It’s a little shiver that starts at the base of her spine and feels like truth. 

Hannibal takes a long drink of his water, then splutters most of it out as he suddenly laughs. “How rude of me,” he says. “I was just remembering the time at our hotel room in Florence. He came up behind me on the balcony and lifted the hem of my robe. Nobody on the street below could see truly what was happening. Will was wearing his pajamas, with just his cock out of the fly. He warned me to be quiet, lest we disturb anybody, and I did try. I did. But his talents were beyond my ability to control myself, and he ended up having to pull me back into the bedroom to finish me off. We both laughed and laughed. Have you ever seen Will laugh—a true, deep laugh born of utter joy? It’s brighter than every star in the sky, Alana.”

The door opens behind her and a guard rushes to her side. “Two men on the northern edge of the perimeter haven’t reported in,” he says. There’s a frightened quaver in his voice. “The… all the cameras on that side and the east are down, ma’am.”

Alana’s blood chills. “Since when?”

“Just a few minutes,” he says. He swallows hard. The walkie strapped to his vest crackles to life and he rips it off. “East sentry, report! Over.”

The voice that answers him is a pained wail, barely human, Alana thinks she heard the word “help” in there, but she could be imagining it.

The walkie crackles again, then the signal clears up. “Hello, Alana.” His voice is calm, but there’s no note of conversational pleasantness as there has been with Hannibal’s.

She takes the unit from the guard’s hand. “Will. You don’t have to hurt anyone. They don’t have lethal weapons. Just come in. It’s not too late.”

Will sighs. “Of course I’m coming in, Alana. I let your goons take Hannibal so that I’d be able to find where you’re all hiding.”

The overhead lights flicker a few times before blacking out. The air circulatory system winds down into silence. A moment later, the generators kick in and the red emergency lights come flashing on.

The guard backs her into the corner, shielding her with his body as he takes out a tranquilizer gun and trains it on the observation room door.

Alana almost drops the walkie, but she grips it in both hands along with the one shred of hope she still has. “You-you were willing to risk letting us kill Hannibal. You’re still you in there, Will.” 

“My better half can take care of himself,” Will says. “Don’t you think?”

She peers around the guard to the window and sees Hannibal just as he’s standing up behind the table. The cuffs and chains fall from his hands. He takes something small and shiny—the pin from Jack’s flower, she now realizes—and bends to his ankles.

He provoked the attack from Jack so he could get the pin, probably hid it between his fingers where nobody would see it. Even the water he’d uncharacteristically spit out was probably meant to slick his wrist enough to wriggle within the restraints so he could get to the locks. 

The guard grabs the walkie from her. “This is Central Unit! I need back up in the roost! Over!”

The interrogation room door opens and Hannibal strides out with his head held high. The guard hits him in the arm with a small dart, but Hannibal instantly flicks it away. He takes a long, slow, deep breath and momentarily closes his eyes.

The guard gapes in uncomprehending horror. “What the fuck is he?” 

“Merely someone who’s built up a tolerance to sedatives over the years,” he says. “Although I’m certain I’ll sleep very soundly in Will’s arms tonight.”

The observation room door bursts open and a figure slumps forward. Alana realizes it’s Jack Crawford before the guard does, and he blasts Jack with two darts in rapid succession.

As his unconscious form drops to the floor, a monster is revealed.

Even knowing that Will Graham was coming, it takes Alana a moment to process what she’s seeing. Like Hannibal, he is nude, but he’s barely visible in the red glow of the emergency lights because he’s camouflaged head to toe in bright, fresh blood. Only the whites of his eyes and the piercing blue of his irises show, along with the slippery shadows of his musculature as he moves towards the guard. 

She doesn’t see exactly what happens, but Will sends the guard flying backwards. His back slams into her and she hits the wall behind her—hard. A spray of something warm and wet hits her face in the microsecond before the back of her head hits the wall. Her vision flickers as she slides to the floor and the guard falls away from her. Will spits out something that she realizes was some part of the guard’s throat.

Hannibal all but throws himself into Will’s arms. They clasp at each other and cover each other’s faces in kisses as if it had been much longer than three days since they’d seen one another. Hannibal, clean until now, is wearing half a mask of the guard’s blood, and handprints of red that look like splayed flight feathers all across his back and waist.

“Is anyone left alive?” Hannibal asks.

“A few guards,” Will says. “Tied up. We can get them on the way out, if you’d like.”

“I was darted just before you came in,” Hannibal says.

Will nods. “I’ll get you to safety,” he says, and kisses Hannibal one more time on the mouth. “We’re safe.”

Alana tries to blink to clear her eyes, but there’s too much blood. When Will kneels down in front of her, he looks flayed and raw. This, she sees even though she’s half blind, is his true essence. This is what he’s been all along, deep down inside 

“I don’t have to kill you,” Will says. “You needed to see this so you’d stop looking for me. You need to leave us alone. Do you understand? Just nod if you can’t speak.”

She nods once, and once more just to make sure.

As Will stands, Hannibal appears in his place. He takes her chin in his hand. “Monsters are merciful sometimes,” he says, and knocks her head into the wall again. “But not every time.”

***

When she comes to, one of the remaining guards is gently shaking her by the shoulders. “Ma’am! Should we pursue off the island? Ma’am!”

She shoves his hands away. “Give me your SAT phone,” she says. As she sits up, the back of her head feels like it’s been bashed into the wall over again. A roiling wave of nausea almost has her doubling over. “Give me your fucking SAT phone!”

He hands it over. “But do you want—“

“Don’t pursue,” she says. “Repeat the order.”

“Don’t pursue,” he says. He looks like he desperately wants to argue with her, but that’s not what he’s paid for. He backs off, but hovers nearby.

Margot answers on the third ring. “Who is this?”

“Your wife,” Alana says. “I’ll explain as soon as I get home. Just tell me you two are okay over there.”

There’s a pause. “We’re fine. The dogs are fine, too. What’s all this about? You’ve barely been back in two years, Alana. Two years on that goddamn island while I wonder what the hell is going on!”

“I’ll explain that, too,” Alana says. “If you’ll let me.”

Margot sighs. “Of course I will. I love you. I’ve missed you. We all have.”

Alana closes her eyes. “I love you, too.”

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to write something for this year’s Bottom Hannibal fest but didn’t have time to start from scratch. Lo and behold I found this creature lurking in my drafts.


End file.
